


between friends

by lonely_is_so_lonely_alone



Category: Law & Order
Genre: F/M, Post-Ep Sideshow, post-ep aftershock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:14:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27160978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonely_is_so_lonely_alone/pseuds/lonely_is_so_lonely_alone
Summary: After Jack walks out of the Grand Jury in 9x14, a old friend comes to visit him in DC- Or Jack and Jamie talk about what pushed him over the edge.
Relationships: Claire Kincaid/Jack McCoy, Jack McCoy & Jamie Ross
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	between friends

**Author's Note:**

> I got to Sideshow in my rewatch - the mention of Jamie Ross in the ep really stuck with me. I really enjoyed writing the Jack/Jamie dynamic in 'three's a crowd' so I wrote some more!

The bar was loud, as most hotel bars were. Filled with business men, ties loose, looking for a one night adventure – with girls with too short skirts and angry, fast make-up scrawled across their smiles. Filled to bursting with blurs, instead of faces - the kind of people who lived their whole lives on the road, state to state with no home ground. 

It was hard to find someone in a place like that, when every smile seemed anonymous. Jamie adjusted her jacket, undid one button then immediately re-threaded it. She looked towards the bar itself, past the cracked leather armchairs, sticky with liquor, and she counted the men sitting there. 

Six, each nursing a drink coolly, backs to the room. The guys who didn’t want to be social, who didn’t feel like catching anyone’s eye except the bartender’s. He was on the end, right up against the wall, shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows, jacket abandoned on the back of the stool. He faced away, at the corridor of booze that sat before him. 

She crossed the space quickly. In her head, she hadn’t really planned for this moment, but since she’d got off the phone with Adam and climbed into her car, she’d known where she was heading.

Thankfully the stool next to him was free and she slipped in, raising a hand to get the attention of the bearded man mixing a cocktail for a pair of young looking girls at the far side. She met the bartender’s wild gaze, said, ‘two whiskies neat’ and that’s when Jack McCoy realised she was there. 

He blinked at her at first, as if he wasn’t sure she was real. How many was he down already? Had he come straight from court and not looked back? Over the time they’d worked together, she’d got used to the sweet smell of whiskey on his skin in the evenings, when he thought nobody was around, or that nobody would care. 

‘I was at a conference on Capitol Hill,’ she said, quickly, anticipating his question. ‘You’re lucky you caught me, I didn’t know you were in town until Adam called.’ 

She glanced across at him. It was the first time she had seen him in months; since she walked out the DA’s office and told herself not to look back. Sitting in this bar in DC, he still had those kicked puppy eyes she remembered. Jack’s tie sat beside them on the bar-top, and two buttons on his shirt had been pulled free. But the drink in his hand, that whiskey she could smell the moment she sat down, there hadn’t a drop drunk. 

‘What are you doing here, Jamie?’ 

He swilled the alcohol round as two more appeared as if from magic before them. She picked one up and drank it down. He stayed staring into his. ‘I know they deposed you but this-‘

She cut in, hands up, ‘Jack, look, I wanted to see if you were ok.’ 

‘I’m always ok.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘So what, Jamie? It’s been months, you don’t have to come save my ass anymore. We don’t work together.’ 

He stayed steadfast, looking down into his drink. 

‘I heard they cited you for contempt,’ she said, holding the spare whiskey with no intention of drinking it. 

‘You’ve been talking to Adam.’ 

She laughed. It wasn’t funny but there was something in the way he said it, like an accusation - like he thought the moment she left, that was it. Kaput. But Jamie kept in the loop, she wasn’t one to fall off the map. Part of her job was knowing people, not cutting them out. And she knew Jack McCoy, whether she wanted to or not.

‘I don’t want to talk about the Grand Jury,’ he said, putting his glass down on the surface with a sudden thud that made her look right at him. He met her gaze for the first time since she’d sat down and she thought, the man sitting beside me isn’t the man who I left in the DA’s office all those months ago. No, it was the guy who five minutes after meeting her said, I don’t need a second chair and walked out like a petulant child. 

She decided to change the subject, for fear he’d shut down completely. He’d done it before, countless times, so Jamie played it safe. ‘How do you like DC, then?’ she asked, uncertainly. He was still huddled over the bar, shoulders high and hunched. He looked like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. 

‘I fucking hate it, Jamie,’ he said, and he laughed and looked over at her. As long as she’d known him, Jack McCoy had always laughed like a cynic. ‘Give me New York, any day.’ 

‘I remember you in LA,’ she said, pushing against him lightly with her shoulder. ‘Like a fish out of water.’ 

He smiled, but his eyes didn’t match. He raised his glass again, still undrunk, and pointed it in her direction. 

‘Did Adam ask you to come here?’ 

He swivelled in his chair to look at her. There was something in the question that annoyed her - the idea that she didn’t care enough to come out of her way to check. That they weren’t friends, so why would she worry about him. 

‘No, he didn’t.’ 

‘How kind of you, then,’ he said, in a way that made it sound like a character flaw. There was a bitterness behind him tonight, and the surprising thing was that he was so steady in the way he spoke that she thought he couldn’t possibly be drunk. That whiskey, untouched and clutched so earnestly, must have been his first.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘I come out here to talk to you and that’s the best I get?’ 

He shrugged his shoulders awkwardly, running a hand down the back of his own neck. ‘How about - where’s Katie?’ 

‘With her father.’ 

‘In New York?’

‘If you must know, he’s taken her to France for school vacation.’ 

Jack shook his head and raised an eyebrow. He was holding the whiskey glass awful tight now. ‘Very fancy,’ he said. 

‘Actually, it’s where Neil’s parents live. They retired to the Riviera.’ 

There was a pause, as if they were waiting to see if the ridiculousness would land, and they caught each other’s eye. Then she laughed. He did too, and for a flicker it was like the Jack she remembered

He bowed his head again, and said, softly - almost too softly for a man like Jack McCoy - ‘You must miss her.’ 

And that was it. The way he spoke. The way he wouldn’t meet her eye as he said it. 

You must miss her. 

Jamie asked him that question, once, months ago now. Her last night in the office, when he watched her pack her things into a cardboard box. They were separated by the glass window that divided the room and he was standing in the doorway to his own office. 

She piled the legal pads and pulled the draws. She pushed pens down the side, into space that didn’t even really exist. 

She had looked up at him, like a ghost there, and thought about the ghost who’d had this desk before her. 

Jamie had stopped packing and said, ‘You must miss her,’ and they were talking about Claire Kincaid. They both knew it. He had looked at her so mournful, like he might cry. She had never seen him cry before.

And at that bar in DC, Jack had that face back - the first and the last face she ever saw him with. The face of grief. She wondered how it took her so long to remember why she recognised it. 

‘Why did you walk out, Jack?’ she said, and she put the whiskey glass down. The bar was still noisy and she had to lean towards him to hear his reply. 

‘I told you I didn’t want-’

‘You walked out of a Federal Grand Jury, something happened. Just-’

He forced his way back into the conversation, hands raised like a surrender. ‘Tell me about Katie,’ he said, and it was desperate, as if he needed her to talk about this instead of asking questions. 

‘It’s not about that, Jack.’ 

He let out a strangled laugh. ‘What is it about, then?’ his voice was raised, strained. He had dropped the whiskey glass and now held his hands together, fingers interlaced, tightly, like a man at prayer. 

‘You know Adam will ask you, the moment you get back to New York.’ 

‘He’s got his mind on the case. We’ve got the suspect now, Dell’s Grand Jury doesn’t matter.’ 

‘I don’t know anything about that, Jack, except that you’re an idiot for thinking Adam Schiff will drop anything.’ 

Beside her, he slipped back into being sullen. Jamie wondered what he would’ve done if she hadn’t shown. Just sat here all night, then climbed onto his airplane the next morning without surrendering to sleep? Would he have stared into that whiskey glass until it told him the meaning of life? Would he have taken one of the girls back to his hotel room, just to forget? 

‘I’m not going to be the last person to ask you what happened in that room, Jack.’ 

She tugged at his rolled up sleeve to try and get him to turn. But his hands were steepled against the bar-top and his gaze fixed. Jamie rested her hand there for a moment, the flats of her fingers against his arm, and she thought, this is the closest we’ve ever been. They worked together for two years and her fingertips against his sleeve was it. 

She remembered the way she’d tried to comfort him the day the Dressler case went up in smoke, and she should’ve talked to him about this then but she didn’t. She let him smile and make promises she knew he’d break. She let him have the moment; his personal crusade of silence. 

‘Don’t be the first, Jamie,’ he said, and he closed his eyes. He spoke quietly, which wasn’t very Jack McCoy of him. He spoke quiet and slow, like a man too tired to fight. And if Jack McCoy was anything, to Jamie he had been a fighter. ‘Please don’t.’ 

He reached towards her with a blind hand. His fingers found hers and wrapped around them. Jack held her tight, with the whole of his hand around hers. 

‘Would you rather Adam?’ 

Jack smirked and opened his eyes. He looked over his shoulder at Jamie. ‘I would rather I got drunk and forgot it even happened.’ 

‘Then why aren’t you already?’ she asked, quickly, pointing to the whiskey, still sitting pretty in amber suspension. He let go of her hand violently, and picked up the glass like an instinct. 

‘Suppose I’m sick of it,’ he said. 

‘The drinking?’ 

Jack swallowed, and turned so his back was against the wall and he was looking at her face on. He crossed his legs and pulled at his own collar. 

He sighed and said, ‘No, the forgetting,’ and his face was a map of creases and crumples, of the time that had worn him down. 

‘Tell me what happened, Jack,’ she said, and she drank the spare whiskey down in one. It burned the back of her throat so she coughed, which made Jack laugh. She slid the empty glasses into a line. 

Beside her, from the atmosphere that hung heavy between them, Jack started with, ‘Dell tried to say Lennie was a bad cop.’ His hands were out in a ‘what the hell’ kind of gesture - wide, expressive. The ring he always wore caught in the light as he waved his arms. 

‘And that was it?’ 

‘No,’ Jack said, fast. ‘No - it was how he did it. Dell wanted to bring me down, that’s why he deposed you, that’s why he brought me to Washington. I’ve got enough skeletons Jamie, he didn’t have to. There’s you, and Lennie and Diana fucking Hawthorne. He really didn’t have to go there.’ 

She wanted to ask the obvious question - where’s there - but he was all ready to keep going, like a coiled spring; once set in motion he was unable to stop. 

And there they were, in this crap bar and this crap hotel in crap DC, and Jack McCoy had his back to the wall. She watched him with curiosity, at the way he moved his hands to express himself, as if the words themselves weren’t good enough. 

Jack pointed his finger, right at her, at her chest, but he was thinking of William Dell when he did it. When he said, ‘He didn’t even say her name. Your lover in the DA’s office. That’s how he put it. Like she didn’t deserve a name.’ 

Maybe Jamie had guessed the moment she’d been deposed, or when she’d been on the phone with Adam and he’d said, ‘they’re going for his reputation.’ Maybe it had been the moment she’d sat beside him and he’d been the Jack McCoy from the Dressler case, the one who’d never be able to take those twelve months in Mount McGregor.

‘What about you, Jack? Do you say her name?’ she asked, pushing the final whiskey glass out of his reach. He hadn’t been expecting the question, still wrapped up in his own thoughts, and he snapped up suddenly. 

He sat there with his mouth open, like he was searching for the right thing to say, the right way to hit back and explain. But they’d talked and not talked about this; it was old ground, from long ago. From late nights when he asked her to stay for a drink and his face said that the girl before her had always said yes. From the days after Dressler, after he’d promised to be better and he had been, for a little while. 

From the day he had tapped lightly on the glass divider and watched her through the window like she was an intruder, a replacement. Jamie Ross knew she was always going to be the one after, she was always going to be not-Claire. She was always just Jamie, and for Jack that was never the right thing. 

But tonight, it was all he was going to get. In DC, away from the office and New York and Adam Schiff who hung like an old god above them. 

Maybe it was here he looked at her for the first time and saw someone else - the woman who wasn’t at that ghost’s desk, who had her own life and her own worries and they were for him, tonight. And it was funny, of course, because they were talking about the ghost. Maybe it was the only way to set them apart. Not that he looked at Jamie and saw Claire - no, but he looked at her and thought if only it was Claire. 

And that was the worst bit because if only never fixed anything. 

‘I see why you walked out,’ she said. And she let it sit there, between them. It sat with the ghost, perhaps, the one that had always been there - and every bit of that silence belonged to Claire Kincaid, who Jamie had never met, who Jamie had never even seen a picture of. But she always knew that she shared Jack McCoy with that ghost, and she always would - that office would never be free of the woman who’d had the desk before her. 

Claire Kincaid was in the walls of the DA’s office, in the chairs and the sofas, in the pictures on the walls. She was in the very bones of Jack McCoy, right down to his spine. There was never any getting out of that. Maybe it had taken Jamie this long to realise it. 

‘You loved her, right?’ she asked, even though it wasn’t a question, really. 

‘Yeah,’ he said, without skipping a beat. 

‘You know it isn’t your fault.’

He shook his head violently. ‘You weren’t there, Jamie. If I hadn’t been at that bar then-’

‘I’m not talking about her dying,’ she said, and she interrupted him sharply, with the last whiskey in her hand. She moved the glass in the circle and watched the drink swirl round. ‘I’m talking about loving her. You don’t have to feel guilty about that.’ 

He smiled slightly, the corner of his lips pulling at his eyes. Jack stuck his hand out towards her and at first the gesture confused her. 

But then she realised that he wanted her to shake it. An offering. And she took it. She shook his hand and as she did it he pulled her towards him. She felt the bones of his shoulders against her hands, the rattling ribs of his chest against her chest. Jack McCoy felt not much of anything in an embrace. 

‘Thank you Jamie,’ he said, once, twice. Over and over. ‘Thank you Jamie.’ 

She listened to him breath and wondered if this would fix him. If all those whiskey’s he hadn’t drunk tonight would help. 

‘Thank you for saving my ass again,’ he said as they pulled apart. They looked around out of embarrassment, as if there’d been something like crossing a line in the embrace. 

‘It’s what friends do, Jack,’ she said. The bar around them was starting to empty out. Jamie wondered what time it was. In the end, she decided it didn’t matter.

Jack turned to her and said, with great promise in his voice, heavy like he was holding it in his hands, ‘I’ll pay you back one of these days.’ 

‘You don’t need to.’ 

‘Oh, you’ll see if I’m ever in court against your ex-husband. A favours a favour, Jamie.’ He looked across the bar at her. He smiled and nodded his head. ‘Between friends, I mean.’ 

Between friends. 

That sounded good to Jamie.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked, please leave a comment.


End file.
